Colonoscopy

Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures or a video to include with this post.

I had my colon examined today. The actual examination was slightly uncomfortable, but painless. The hard part for me was cleaning everything out the night before. It really reminded me of travelling. The preliminary diagnosis is irritable bowel syndrome likely caused by an infection I picked up who knows where. My stomach hasn't been quite right for a few years now and I have mostly just tolerated it. This has given me some really good shit stories, but I finally decided to have it checked out. Apparently, colonoscopies are all the rage these days. I also had some blood work done to see if I am allergic to gluten and I am not eating dairy for two weeks.

This Hubble image is of two merging galaxies. The shapes of both galaxies have been distorted by their gravitational interaction with one another. Interacting galaxies often exhibit high rates of star formation. This particular merging galaxy is in the constellation Leo approximately 300 million light-years away from Earth. Click on the image to see a big view.

Image Credit: NASA

Bryson, Mel's godbrother, wanted his picture on the internet.

Happy Thanksgiving

Patrick and Maranda join us a Barley's Taproom in Rutherfordton aka 'Roughton'

I am in North Carolina and man do I love the South. The only drawback, nobody can understand a single thing I am saying. I talk and folks just scrunch up their faces and say, 'Whut?' Mel and I drove out here in a single push. It took us over 25 hours. I know it seems crazy, but we actually had a really great time doing it. We listened to music, talked about fun stuff, saw some country we had never seen before and generally enjoyed ourselves. That said, we are flying next time.

Mel's mom, June, had no idea we were coming and it was pretty fun to surprise her. She was totally floored when we showed up Thursday morning. Since we neglected to tell her we were coming, we couldn't very well expect her to cook for us, so I made a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat. Y'all would a been real proud o me. It is hard to cook a 5 course meal in someone else's kitchen with limited preparation. We had a turkey, stuffin, gravy, mashed taters, cranberry, grean beans, squash and a spinach salad. No mac-n-chz til Friday, when we ate another Thanksgiving at Mel's grandmothers.

Old Crow Medicine Show

If you ever get a chance to see OCMS live, DO IT! Their albums are pretty darn good, but they absolutely rock at a live show. We had a full tilt hoedown at the Boulder Theatre last night. Whiskey, criminally awesome bluegrass, front-row dancing, disintegrating fiddle bows, lots of hollerin', and the beautiful people of Boulder were just a few of the things that made last night so special.

Delta IV Heavy

We are launching a pretty cool rocket tomorrow night. The 230 ft tall Delta IV Heavy is basically three hydrogen boosters strapped together for a total thrust of nearly 2,000,000 lbs at liftoff. Despite the two million pounds of thrust, the thrust ratio is only 1.2:1 making this heavy pretty slow off the pad. That should give plenty of time to check out the three massive pillars of flame. This will be the most spectacular night launch since Saturn V launched Apollo 17 in 1972.

The massive rocket scheduled for liftoff from Cape Canaveral's Complex 37 at 8:39 p.m. EST. The evening's launch window will extend 122 minutes to 10:41 p.m. EST. You can view the launch here.

Tahoe

Lou and Jaz invited us to join them in Tahoe when we last saw them at Graham and Greta's wedding and we readily accepted. Jasmine's family has a time-share in Tahoe and uses it as a good excuse to escape the beginnings of the cold Alaskan winter. Melanie is the Crocs account manager for California and was extended the offer to use one of here co-workers condos at Tahoe for the weekend. My reaction to this news was, "Cool, maybe we should make sure both condos are at least in the same town, Tahoe is a pretty big lake." To make a long story short, the two houses ended up being two blocks apart in Incline Village at the North end of the lake.

Thursday evening Mel, Alison, Sean and I flew to Reno where we rented a car, a first for me, and drove to Incline village to meet up with Louie and Jasmine. One thing led to another, and before we knew it, it was 4am and there were a lot of empty bottles of wine. Jasmine's parents own a winery in Alaska so we had an ample supply all weekend.

At this point I would usually say what we did each day, but all of our days in Tahoe were basically the same. We slept in until 8 because we stayed up way too late the night before. Ate a giant brunch. This was followed by an fairly successful attempt to be active. Post activity, we ate a giant and excellent dinner then stayed up way too late playing cards and talking. Highlights, I won $40 off the Ducks and lost it playing Blackjack. Mel and I climbed an excellent route at Lovers Leap with Mel and I swapping trad leads for the first time. Skinny-dipping in the lake was definitely a highlight with almost everyone joining in the fun.

New Car

So, Mel and I decided to get a new car. After much debate, I wanted a Mini for my commute, we decided on a Subaru Impreza. We got a white '99 that is great shape and quite fun to drive. Well, after a week, I have already crashed it. Yep, I was in my first automobile accident ever, unless you count those times when Phil was driving, or that time I drove my dad's truck through the neighbor's fence and busted open that yellowjacket nest. Anyway, It was my first collision with another vehicle at highway speeds. I was on my way to work Thursday morning and using one of the rare passing lanes on 93 when this black Audi TT passed on the right going like 87.24 mph. Since the passing lane had already ended, the Audi merged in front of the Toyota truck I was following. The Toyota had to lock up his wheels to keep from colliding with the Audi and that sucked for me. I swerved into the empty oncoming passing lane to keep from rear-ending the Toyota, which was great except for the oncoming traffic and the fact that the Toyota chased me over there and hit me anyway. The Audi started to pull over, then flipped us off and sped away. Colorado plate 070-EBB. I am fine and the new Subi did surprisingly well. A new front quarterpanel and two new passenger side doors and it will be good as new. I wonder what would have happened in a Mini?

Great American Beer Fest

This is from last weekend. It was my birthday and I wanted to go to the GABF. It was pretty darn cool. They had thousands of beers on tap and thousands of people there to enjoy them. The only drawback was the scarcity of brewers to talk to. Mostly the beer was just served by blokes that had no knowledge of the beer they were serving.

Awesome day

Last Saturday I had the most fun I have had in a very long time. I woke up early and headed to the famous Gore canyon on the Colorado for some good class V boating. Gore is basically Colorado's only late season class V and attracts boaters from all over the state. Dana and some friends drove up from Durango for the fun. We had one raft of 6 and about a dozen kayakers along for the fun. The crux of the run is definitely the 3 mile flatwater paddle into the canyon, but once that was out of the way the fun began in earnest with half a dozen quality drops. One of the kayakers, Maria, proved herself to be quite hard when she broke her finger in one of the first class Vs. She didn't swim, just flipped and mashed her finger on a rock. Once she rolled up she realized that another boater (not with our group) was swimming and helped him to shore. Afer the rescue effort Maria gritted her teeth, buddy taped her finger, and paddled the other burl. I was impressed.

After some beers at the take-out, consumed from booties for some, I hit the road to meet up with Mel at Red Rocks. For those of you that are unfamiliar, Red Rocks is one of those super famous venues that artists love. This often means a great performance. Couple that with the fact that we were there to see The Flaming Lips and I knew we were in for an incredible evening. It turns out that I was right. It was everything I expected and way more. Definitely the coolest show ever. Very visually stimulating and they played a great set. For those of you unfamiliar with the music of The Flaming Lips, I have included a song.

Pikes Peak Marathon

A while back Josh suggested an interesting adventure and I readily agreed, mostly because it sounded like a fair bit of suffering would be involved. Josh's proposal was to hike/run the Barr trail (7,000+ ft. of vertical in 13 miles - one way) to the summit of Pikes Peak. The trail was actually quite beautiful and made for a good day out.

My prediction of suffering was fairly accurate. I am accustomed to early starts of the three to four AM variety, but 1:30, that's pushing it. I developed a cool new technique for sleeping while hiking. I call it "sleepwalking." Once I woke up my body performed fairly well until the next day when it refused to move. Maybe I am getting old or maybe I am out of shape, but I can't remember the last time I was this sore. Josh is largely unaffected by the effort and seems to be quite amused by my robot-esque shuffling about the house.

The highlight for me definitely came on the descent when we decided to run the first six miles back to the car. We randomly picked the same day for our outing as the Pikes Peak Challenge, which only ascends the peak. Not only was running down the trail really fun, everyone coming up thought Josh and I were really hardcore for running back down.

Jeepers Creepers

View from the summit of Little Bear. On the right is Blanca and the left is Ellingwood. We traversed all the ridges connecting the peaks and the shadow delineated ridge descending left from Ellingwood.

Three day weekends are great! This time all the roomies plus a random guy, that I think Josh works with, headed down to the Sangre de Cristo range for some backpacking and peak bagging. The backpacking was less than spectacular. The valley we hiked into was beautiful, but we hiked in along "the toughest 4WD road in Colorado." The jeepers really weren't very annoying, but their presence definitely detracted from the wilderness feel of the place. The road/trail into the valley was heinous to hike because of all the boulders strewn about and I kept finding myself thinking, "I can't believe that people drive up this." Not the greatest hiking thought. We did get free cookies though.


Ridge leading up to Blanca.

Climbing on Saturday made the weekend. Josh and I headed out early to climb three fourteeners in a day. A nice class IV route lead to the top of Little Bear. Then we followed a mile long knife edge ridge to the top of Blanca, where we met Ashley and Ryan (the random guy). Ryan joined us for Ellingwood and the descent down the equally precipitous SW ridge back to camp. Meanwhile Mel had a nice ride with some friendly jeepers and hung out with her dog. Back at camp we enjoyed the numerous bottles of wine and beers we had slogged up to camp.


Little Bear Peak with Crater Lake in the foreground.

Date Nite

The Kitchen's wonderful mussels.

Mel and I have started going out to dinner every Thursday. Boulder has an amazing restaurant scene and being new to town we wanted a good excuse to check out some new places. We have been doing this for about a month now and last night we finally made it to The Kitchen. This place is amazing. Apparently Organic magazine voted it one of the 10 best restaurants in America. We were equally impressed. It was definitely one of the best meals I have had in my life. We started the evening with the mussels and a bottle of Côtes du Rhône Rosé. Mel enjoyed the grilled Hawaiian Ahi and I had some amazing scallops for dinner. We finished off with a chocolate torte that surpassed my mom's and Mel tried the 20 year tawny port. I was the driver and elected not to go for dessert wine, instead a nice espresso finished well with the amazing chocolate. I think y'all should come to Boulder so we can go do fun active stuff by day and eat scrumptious food in the evenings.

The Coon

I woke up at 4am this morning, which is not entirely unusual. Today Mel woke me up with an alarmed sounding "KEITH!!!" I immediately assumed the naked kung-fu position on the bed prepared for all-out burglar self-defense. Meanwhile, it sounds as if Cota has the burglar by the jugular in the living room. There is definitely a fight going on out there. Mel is out of the bedroom and I follow behind turning out all the lights she just turned on. I come into the dining room to find Cota in a standoff with a big ol' raccoon next to his food bowl. Food is spread everywhere and it is obvious that Cota and the coon had just been going at it pretty seriously. I wish I had seen and taken video of Cota attacking the raccoon to try and protect his food. Next, Mel grabbed the dog and I watched dumbly as the devious animal retreated out the hole in the screen door. I'm really happy it was a raccoon and not a skunk. That would have sucked.

First Launch

Delta II rocket lifts off carrying Phoenix Mars explorer

This morning ULA launched their first rocket since I started there on Monday. The Delta II rocket left Cape Canaveral carrying the Phoenix Mars Explorer. The mission is to land near the North Pole of Mars and look for water ice below the soil. The Phoenix is scheduled to land on Mars in May of next year. It will survive there for the Martian summer before it freezes in a solid shell of carbon-dioxide ice during the brutal winter.

The first week of work was pretty slow, but now I am moved in and have stuff set up. The highlight was taking a two day class on the Atlas V rocket. I learned lots of neat stuff like; the Atlas V 551 generates the power of 13 Hoover dams for the 4 minutes following takeoff. Unfortunately, I can't share most of the cool stuff I learn at work, because my blog is public and some N. Korean rocket scientist could be reading.